A Stanford professor who battled James Joyce's estate for the right to quote family documents in research on one of the author's most celebrated works will get $240,000 from the estate for her legal fees, the university said Monday.

Carol Shloss' settlement with Joyce's heirs ends a court case in which the estate, fiercely protective of its rights to his works, refused to let Shloss use excerpts from his papers or his daughter's medical records in her 2003 book, "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake."

The book's thesis was that Joyce's daughter Lucia, who spent most of her adult life in mental institutions, had been a gifted young woman and the inspiration for the main female character in "Finnegans Wake," Joyce's last novel, published two years before his death in 1941.

Threatened with a lawsuit, Shloss deleted material from the book, leading some critics to write that she had failed to back up her assertions. She then sued the estate and reached a settlement in 2007 that allowed her to restore the material in the United States and on the Internet.

That settlement was a compromise that did not resolve the extent of a researcher's right to quote excerpts of copyrighted works. But a federal judge in San Jose ruled in May that Shloss was the prevailing party and awarded her $329,000 in legal fees and costs. The estate dropped its appeal last week and agreed to a $240,000 settlement.

The fee agreement sets no legal precedent, but "there's a kind of warning," Shloss said Monday. "We've established that if you don't pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws protect, you might have to pay something."

A lawyer for the estate was unavailable for comment.

Stephen Joyce, the author's grandson and co-trustee of his estate, has been assertive in protecting the estate's publication rights. A 2006 New Yorker article said he once told a British performer, inaccurately, that he had probably violated the copyright law by memorizing part of "Finnegans Wake" to recite it on stage.

Shloss said she had once attended a conference where another scholar feared reciting Joyce's words aloud and instead projected them on a screen.

Shloss' difficulties in publicly documenting her research also reflect the strictness of U.S. copyright law, which allows a writer's descendants to control unpublished works for decades.

The original U.S. copyright on Joyce's writings expired in 1991, 50 years after his death. But a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998 added 20 years to all such lapsed terms, restoring the Joyce estate's control through 2011.

"We thought we could quote from writers we were writing about, and then we couldn't," Shloss said. "The consequence was that people like myself, writing about (Sigmund) Freud or (Virginia) Woolf or (Ezra) Pound, truly had their work set back."